Editor’s Note: The Freedom Center’s ad below was published in the Washington University in St. Louis student paper, “Student Life,” as a paid ad and run on September 20th. The letter that follows it , written by “J Street U & Wash. U. Students for Israel,” appeared in the September 21st edition of the same paper.

The Freedom Center’s Ad:

The Palestinians’ Case Against Israel is Based on a Genocidal Lie

It is true that the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza are suffering. But they are suffering because of sixty years of Arab aggression; sixty years of Arabs rejecting peace, and sixty years of Arab wars to destroy the Jewish state. They are suffering because whenever the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were given the opportunity to hold free elections, they elected corrupt and terrorist regimes to rule over them.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas Government of Gaza both claim that Israel is “Occupied Palestine.” This is a lie. Israel does not occupy “Palestine.” When Israel was created in 1948, there was no Palestine nation to occupy. There has been no state, no country, no nation called Palestine in the Middle East since Roman times. Palestine is a geographical region of the Middle East. Its status is identical to that of New England in America. It is not and has never been a nation.

The derivation of the name “Palestine” is Roman, not Arabic. It was a name affixed to the Jewish homeland as an insult and punishment when Rome conquered Jerusalem and dispersed most of the Jews who lived there to the four corners of the globe.

The land on which Israel now stands is not Arab and is not Palestinian. It was part of the Turkish empire for four hundred years when the Jewish state was created. The Turks are not Arabs and there was never a province, nor entity in the Turkish empire called “Palestine.”

In fact virtually no Arabs called themselves “Palestinians” until 1964 when the “Palestine Liberation Organization” was created – sixteen years after the creation of the Jewish state. In 1949 Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt annexed Gaza. But these annexations of the so-called Palestinian homeland called forth no protests from the Arab world nor the “Palestinians” themselves.

In 1964 Jordan ruled the West Bank and Egypt ruled Gaza but the Palestine Liberation Organization did not call for the liberation of the West Bank or Gaza. It only called for the destruction of the “Zionist entity.” That is because the Palestinian nation is a historical fiction invented in 1964 as a rationale for destroying the Jewish state.

Throughout human history, people have suffered deprivation and oppression. But never before in all of human history has a people waged a calculated war on women and children, and honored the murderers who targeted innocents as heroes and martyrs. This is the moral truth of the war against Israel: It is a genocidal war and its motivation is hate.

The lie that Israel “occupies” Palestine is an expression of Jew-hatred and its goal is Israel’s destruction. Israel is bordered to the east by the Jordan River and to the west by the Mediterranean sea.

The slogan – “Palestine Must Be Free From the River to the Sea” – is a slogan of Jew-hatred – a demand that the Jewish state and its citizens disappear.

This September the Arab League will attempt to take another step in its sinister sixty-year effort to erase the indigenous people of the geographical region called Palestine. They will attempt to establish a theocratic Muslim state called Palestine. They will do so unilaterally – that is without signing a peace agreement to end their sixty year aggression – and their leaders will continue to claim the territory between “the river and the sea.” The civilized world needs to stand up and oppose this latest genocidal campaign against the Jews, who have created the only democracy, the only tolerant society and the only nation that seeks peace in the entire Middle East.

Published as a public service
by the David Horowitz Freedom Center
www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org

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Letter from J Street U & Wash. U. Students for Israel:

Ad-ing Nothing

September 22, 2011 J Street U & Wash. U. Students for Israel

As many students are aware, in its last issue, StudLife decided to print an inflammatory paid advertisement by David Horowitz entitled, “The Palestinians’ case against Israel is based on a genocidal lie.” As representatives of the leading pro-Israel groups at Washington University, we would like to respond to that decision.

We certainly recognize David Horowitz’s right to express his opinions, no matter how abhorrent we may find them. We also recognize StudLife’s right to print the advertisement. We believe, however, that it was inappropriate for the paper to choose to do so. We emphasize the word choose because there is ample legal precedent indicating that it would have been within the paper’s rights to refuse to print the ad. We seek to advance the argument that just because printing the ad was the paper’s legal right, it does not mean that it was the right decision.

In the disclaimer published four pages away, StudLife exhibited several deficiencies in its justification for printing its ad. The paper claims that it ran the ad in order to “generate a conversation that this community should have.” To achieve this goal, StudLife could have requested that Wash. U. Students for Israel or J Street U submit op-eds explaining our opinions on the situation. However, StudLife instead chose to import a radical opinion on the conflict from outside our community. This demonstrates that StudLife attempted to create a controversy where none had previously existed. It is our position that, from a journalistic perspective, it should be the task of a newspaper to report on controversy rather than manufacture it.

Even assuming that fostering debate is a legitimate journalistic pursuit, it was still inappropriate for StudLife to publish the ad. First, and most fundamentally, the ad was blatantly racist and the use of the label “genocide” was extreme and malicious, especially coming from an individual who has made previously problematic statements. StudLife suggests that the ad will “cause anger in some people while eliciting admiration and respect in others.” If we, the pro-Israel groups on campus, find this ad offensive, who exactly does StudLife believe will “admire” the opinions of the ad? The StudLife disclaimer does little to assuage our anger—do the benefits of creating controversy or debate outweigh the deficits of offending a strong majority of the student population?

Furthermore, the printing of this advertisement is counterproductive to StudLife’s stated goal of fostering campus discussion. As previously mentioned, StudLife could have asked the pro-Israel community for its responses to the Palestinian effort to seek recognition of statehood at the U.N., which would have fostered a respectful and reasonable debate. Instead, StudLife chose to expropriate the voice of the campus pro-Israel community for the radical, racist and outsider opinion of David Horowitz. As a result of this usurpation, the campus pro-Israel position has been misrepresented as unfairly extreme. By printing the ad, StudLife has forced us to write this op-ed distancing ourselves from the bigoted opinions of Horowitz, in the hopes that the general student body will understand that his position does not reflect the position of our community. By radicalizing the issue, StudLife has detracted from the fairness and dignity of our campus debate.